Farmers and poets gathered to recite pastoral verse at the Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vt., listen to the museum's Susan Peden read a poem on June 6. / Glenn Russell, The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press

by Sally Pollak, The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press

by Sally Pollak, The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. -- Edwin James milked cows for 30 years at his farm. When he retired from farming, suddenly James had a lot of time on his hands. It was, he said, "strange."

"I had part of the summer to relax a little," James said, "and I started writing a bit."

He kept on writing, and after some years he had filled four books with poems and stories and tales for kids.

"All my work is about my experiences during my life and ideas that came to me because of what I did for living," James said.

He read his poems and a story earlier this month at the Sheldon Museum in Middlebury. The reading - which one audience member said was the best attended poetry reading ever held in Middlebury (a crowd of 40!) â?? featured farmer-poets, or poet-farmers.

James, 77, belongs to the first group. He moved to the Shoreham farm in 1937, at the age of 2.

"I was a very poor student in school," he said. "In a class of 10, I was 11. I'm not a great speller. I never thought I could do anything like this."

The pairing of poets and farmers harkens back some time in Vermont â?? at least and most famously to Robert Frost. Frost wrote "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" at his farm in Shaftsbury. He belongs to the poet-farmer side of the equation.

"Robert Frost was not the world's great farmer," said Philip Baruth, a professor of English at the University of Vermont. "But a lot of his poetry came out of that connection."

The connection concerns an endeavor that can engage your body and free your mind, suggested Baruth, who teaches a course in Vermont literature. "It's close contemplation of a small bit of ground, so you get into microscopic detail," he said. "And that's where a lot of poetic wonder comes from, too."

The reading at the Sheldon Museum was connected to an exhibit, "From Dairy to Doorstep: Milk Delivery in New England," on display through Aug. 4.

James is a former dairyman. But mostly the agri-poets who read at Sheldon Museum, whose collection focuses on local history, belong to the chicken farmer, beekeeper, garlic-grower variety of farming.

That group includes poet Jim Ellefson, who lives in Leicester at Stoney Lonesome farm and teaches writing at Champlain College. Ellefson, 60, grows garlic, fingerling potatoes and asparagus, and tends fruit trees.

"I can't make sense of literature or writing unless my hands are dirty," he said. "I'll spend hours in the fields and there's so much time: You got to focus on what you're doing, but at the same time it gives you some dream time as a writer."

He brings his students to the farm and says digging in the dirt is often what they need as writers - and feel they're missing in life.

"The thing is, it's real," Ellefson said. "You can put your shoulder to the wheel and make things happen. You can see what your efforts and the sweat of your brow create. So much of farming, if you really get down to it, is about loss. In many ways it reflects on life directly."

David Weinstock, a poet in Middlebury, served as a kind of referee at the Sheldon reading, or at least an emcee. "There are probably more poets than farmers in Addison County," Weinstock said.

He talked about his family's heritage as egg farmers in New Jersey, and traced the roots of poet-farmers beyond the borders of Vermont and to the distant past.

"In classical Rome, for poets to pretend to be farmers was a very big deal," Weinstock said. "It was very prestigious to pretend to be a farmer."

Julia Shipley, 41, is a poet who lives in Craftsbury, where she raises "lambs, chickens and poems" at Chickadee Farm. She is a subsistence farmer with a small cash crop of pie pumpkins. Growing her own food is a way to engage her "poetic ambitions" with less risk of becoming a starving artist, she said.

Shipley led off the reading with her poem "Two Eggs." She was moved to write it when she was struck by the generosity of her chickens as she cleaned out a butchered laying hen and found within egg upon egg upon egg.

"I already liked my chickens a lot," Shipley said. "Even though I was doing them in."

Strong and clear poems, written in beautiful language by Ella Warner Fisher, were read by Mary Pratt of New Haven. Fisher was a farmwoman-poet who lived and wrote in Vergennes at the turn of the century. (She died in 1937 at age 84).

She found Fisher's memoir, unauthored, at a small antiques store in New Haven half a dozen years ago and began to research the writer. Pratt discovered Fisher published five books of poetry after the age of 65.

"Her poems are lovely," Pratt said. "She should be remembered."

Fisher was a descendant of Col. Seth Warner, a leader of the Green Mountain Boys. She wrote about the seasons. She wrote about the night. This was not surprising to Pratt.

"She had eight children," Pratt said. "She was a farmwoman. She wrote at night, I'm sure."

James, the dairy farmer, also wrote about the time of day he knew and the natural phenomena he observed from his Addison County fields. He's interested, as well, in farm people.

James read an essay about friends in Bridport whom he brought to life, in words, through the image of a door opening and closing: the comings-and-goings of farm and family life.

James described the wife who "greeted her tired mate at supper time." As families move on and out, he mourned that loss: "Houses don't like to be empty," James read.

Baruth said he thinks Leland Kinsey is Vermont's "quintessential poet-farmer."

Kinsey, 63, did not read poetry at the Sheldon Museum. He was at home in Barton, where he's working on a collection of poems as correspondence, a form of letters. Kinsey's poetry collections include "In the Rain Shadow," a volume that concerns farming in Tanzania and Vermont.

Kinsey grew up on a dairy farm in Albany; his relatives have farmed in Vermont for many generations. He recognizes a relation between farming and writing poems.

"There's variety and intensity that are brought together for both endeavors, I guess, " Kinsey said. "Farming involves paying close attention to a lot of things. And poetry certainly requires that same vigilance."

Kinsey has a clear memory of being a 12-year-old kid, riding around the hayfield raking.

"And thinking at the same time how absolutely boring that was and how wonderful it was to be in that field seeing everything I was seeing," Kinsey said. "And actually wondering, even at that age, could I ever describe that?"

Sometimes you can do the two at once: "When you're farming there's an awful lot of alone time," Kinsey said. "So you have an awful lot of time to think."